Our Code Compliance series features perspectives from industry leaders.
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San Luis Obispo
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Municipal Building
Code Enforcement
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Yeah. My name is Mike Wells, and my job is as a developer. We're like the NFL head coach down on the sidelines – responsible for all the players and all of the personnel in a development project – the architects, the engineers, the contractor, the banker, the land seller, the title company, the surveyor, etc. That's our team we put together, and we're reporting to the owner who's sitting up in the box in nice weather.
Most of our work is within the Portland metro area, which has 27 jurisdictions – if you count the cities and the counties. We also do work up and down I-5 – as far north as Seattle, as far south into California – and we did a couple of projects in Phoenix.
There are so many jurisdictions, and at each given project there's generally a lead jurisdiction, whether it's a city or a county. But then there are a lot of other jurisdictions – the sewer agency, the water department or district, the stormwater agency (sometimes separate), the environmental quality department, the fire department – and so on any given project, we can have easily a dozen jurisdictions. Sometimes they communicate well together, but other times there's friction between them, and we're in a position where we've got to try to make peace in order to get our permits.
So given you work with so many different parties – be it the architects, engineers, contractors, manufacturers, and the like – and then multiple jurisdictions and multiple departments within each of these jurisdictions, what are some of the biggest challenges you see in getting a building built? You can treat it soup to nuts – anywhere along that path.
Supply chain can sometimes be a real challenge – materials don’t arrive when they’re supposed to, and construction or fit-up can get held up as a result. So that’s something we start managing very early in the process.
The irony is, for instance, with electrical gear for larger manufacturing buildings, we sometimes have to order it 7–5 months ahead of time. So we’re actually ordering the electrical gear before we’ve advanced the design past just a sketch – otherwise, we can’t get it there in time when the building’s done and ready for power.
Then we have challenges with the jurisdictions – there’s an inspection regimen with a long list of required inspections at different intervals in order to advance the project, and jurisdictions won’t allow you to move forward until you’ve passed the prior inspection.
That’s where Ichi comes in handy. Sometimes an inspector in the field writes us up for an infraction, citing a code that’s actually incorrect. So we have to mount an argument and convince them that they’ve misinterpreted it.
In one case, the inspector insisted we needed emergency egress lighting at every row of racking in a warehouse. Our interpretation of the code – and the architect’s – was that lighting was only required along the designated code exit path. The plan checker disagreed, insisting on lighting in every row.
At the front end of a project, initial design typically takes 3–4 months, involving the architect, planner, civil, structural, mechanical, and soils engineers. Then we hand in a bundle of drawings – and often wait literal months for plan check. If it goes smoothly, it might take 6 months. If not, it could take 12, 15, even 18 months.
What’s most frustrating to our customers is all that time where, from their perspective, nothing’s happening.
That’s really interesting to hear. And I’m curious – going back to that example with the emergency exit signs – there was the fee you mentioned, but I think from what we discussed earlier, it actually took weeks of emails back and forth with different people just to resolve the issue. You had the architect, the engineer, manufacturing – everyone weighing in. Is that typical? That it takes that much time just to solve something like that?
Even very specific issues do. It's very rare that it’s just one design professional or only one person at the jurisdiction.
In this case, for instance, the racking design firm was involved, the electrical engineer was involved because it’s lights, and then at the jurisdiction level, the electrical inspector, the building inspector, and the fire marshal were all involved. What happens is one of them flags an issue, and then we try to respond to that – but it has to be approved by the others. Often what we’ll do is approach them by email, or if we can occasionally get them to answer the phone, we’ll trial our solution. Based on their feedback, we have the design team alter the drawings – that may take a week. Then the client has to approve those, and sometimes we have to get it priced by the contractor before the owner will commit. Then we turn it in – and wait.
Yeah. When it comes to code compliance across all these different people – not even just the jurisdictions, but on the commercial side – the engineers, the architects, contractors and the like, how knowledgeable are they on these situations? Or how much are people just learning as they go? And if so, how do you guys learn? Is it usually just through pain and mistakes, or are there ways of getting in front of it?
Well, it's an interesting question. I feel like there's kind of 3 overlapping situations that lead to complexity here. One is that a lot of the more trained or well-trained design professionals are retiring and the younger architects, engineers, planners that are coming into the profession, many of them by their nature just don't have the same expertise or experience and they're hard to recruit. It's a universal truth that almost every engineering firm can't hire enough engineers. Civil engineers, structural engineers, mechanical engineers – they just can't find them. They're just not there. The schools are not turning out as many as the industry needs. And so that's 1 layer.
Then another layer is the codes are incredibly complex and they're getting more so all the time. And that requires a deeper, broader knowledge base by the design professionals to address them. The 3rd layer on top of that is our business, our customers and what they're doing is getting more complex as our world is. Microprocessors get smaller and smaller for water to wash semiconductors was enormously complex and it had a lot of flammable fluids that need to be mixed together in order to wash these semiconductors. And so the complexity of dealing with this. Another was I asked Ichi about 1 client's issue about whether aluminum dust from milling aluminum was explosive.
I didn't know about aluminum but I asked Ichi and sure enough I got a response within seconds that yes aluminum dust can be explosive given the right concentration of air and the dust.
Well that's something of course the design team wouldn't know anything about and I was able to introduce that into the conversation early so that we would then begin to address it with the jurisdiction.
If you could imagine a world where instead of an unknown 6 to 18 months to get a plan review complete – or an unforeseen inspector coming out to the job with a late-breaking issue that finds some violation nobody had mentioned before – if that suddenly became predictable and happened in 9 months, 3 months, or even a month or less, how would that impact the speed and overall cost of construction?
It would be very beneficial, and these projects – generally speaking – we tell our customer it's gonna take at least 2 years to deliver from that first time we sit down with them to do the design, the permitting, and the construction. And many of them say we just don't have that time. If they aren't able to take that on within a certain period, they're gonna miss out on that new business opportunity. And so speeding up that permitting process would increase our economy.
If you think about it multiplied by lots of projects – and in the residential sector – it would go a long way toward addressing the housing shortage.
Because now maybe the rents are sufficient to get a return on their investment – but who knows about 2 years from now, if it's gonna take a year to get it drawn and permitted, and another year to build it.
So their risk goes up a lot as time goes on. Shrinking that permitting process would have a dramatic – favorable – impact on the industry.
How are you seeing AI change your work – or your team's work – or all the different constituents you work with day to day?
We're seeing AI implemented in the writing part of permit applications. The planners often write 50–100 page documents that respond to every sentence of the planning code with how our project conforms. They're using AI to help in that writing so it's concise, crisp, and readable for the jurisdiction. We're also seeing it used to some extent in interpreting plans and solving riddles with the code.
That's where Ichi has been really helpful – we can troubleshoot issues and move them along faster. You mentioned earlier the many people involved – it might be 3 plan reviewers and a couple of design professionals. If we can using AI understand what the solution is faster then we can get that through the whole team much faster.
Things we've heard almost universally from people is this desire to have the same rules of the game – no matter who's playing it. That the jurisdiction, the developer, and everyone working on the project all understand and interpret the codes the same way. So if you can imagine a world where that happens, how do you see that impacting and changing the projects?
It'd be really good. Where I think that would help the most is where codes overlap or intersect one another. A good example is the building code and the fire code. Those are generally reviewed by different reviewers – often different agencies sitting in different buildings or even different cities – but those rule books intersect at points like the exiting aisles with exit signs the fire marshal wants to see.
The fire code says something about them, and the building code says something else. The architect may be proficient with the building code but not as familiar with the fire code. An AI product could help design professionals understand how to solve for both codes quickly – instead of drawing it to meet one code, submitting it, and then getting marked up by the fire marshal, wondering, "Well, what are we supposed to do? The building code says this, the fire marshal says that."
Gotcha. So you guys – it can literally mean months of delays.
One of the things I'd love for you to speak to a bit is that you use Ichi AI in a mobile capacity – on the go.
Yeah. So could you help us understand a bit of a day in the life, job to job, and how you're able to use AI? What kind of time does it save you, or what kind of support does it give as a companion with you on the ride?
Yeah, we have generally weekly job site meetings – the design team, the contractor, and the owner meet and go through a fairly regimented agenda about issues that have come up since the last meeting. Coming out of those meetings, it's not unusual to have something puzzling us.
A week ago, the contractor pointed out that the drawings were inconsistent on where the foundation drain would go next to the concrete foundations. The question arose – what does the slope have to be on those foundation drains? If the slope isn't too steep, then we can probably make it all the way down to the end of the building and run into a storm sewer.
So as I was leaving the job site, I dictated to Ichi to pose the question: what is the minimum slope required for a foundation drain in Millersburg, Oregon?
When I got back to the office, I opened my laptop and saw the response – it cited the section of the plumbing code that applies and the section of the mechanical code that applies. And it turns out 0 is the minimum – it can be flat.
I emailed that to the civil engineer and he said, “Well, this is gonna be easy then.” So we were able to get to that solution, and the next day the contractor actually installed the drain without delay.
When it comes to tools like Ichi that are purpose-built for this industry, why is it important that they’re built specifically for construction and code compliance in order to be trusted?
To the extent we've used ChatGPT or Gemini to try to answer these code questions, we don't get the same level of detail – and it's not always right. One of the things I really like about a more recent edition of Ichi is that the code section is underlined – we can hover over it, see the actual code, and read it ourselves. Here's the interpretation by Ichi – but then we can verify it with the source the plan examiner is going to look at.
And you have 5 or 10 years from now, as Ichi AI gets more and more advanced and powerful, how do you imagine it's going to impact the industry and the people that you work with?
I think one of the things it's gonna do is bring some design professionals, applicants like ourselves, and the jurisdiction plan reviewers closer together.
There's less of “Gosh, I need to dig through that code and really understand it, and I don't have the time to do it” – so that delays a decision, which then creates angst because we've got contractors standing around waiting on a solution.
So, I think that speed of AI to the solution that everybody can rally around is gonna bring everybody together – because then there's just less friction. It's just like, “oh, okay. Yeah. That's the right answer. That's the right answer.” And they check the box and issue our permit.
Yeah. One thing I wanted to ask you about is – you've got 30, 40 years of experience in this industry – and I think sometimes there's maybe more animosity from the more tenured generation, or AI seems like something for folks who are just coming up. But it's something you've adopted – and had others on your team adopt. What would you say to someone who's a bit more skeptical – wondering if they can actually use this and if it'll provide real value?
Just try it. You'll like it.
